[Sigia-l] Date ranges

[Greg Richards]

Why are you concerned that users will reverse the dates and request a  "to"
date before a "from" date?  Is this action demonstrated in the server logs
or usability testing?

My initial thought is that you may be trying to solve a problem that will
not occur very often. Trying to fix it so that there is never an invalid
range may lead to a lot of interface overhead that gets in the way of users
who actually do understand the search criteria and enter dates in the
prescribed range/chronological order. Think of how annoying it is when MS
Office tries to auto-format a document and then you can't turn off the
"helpful" formatting.

I'd stick with a simple error message that gets them back on track. At the
risk of sounding anti-user, this is the kind of error that users make one
time - and it has more to do with the user not reading than with a poor UI.

--
Gregory Richards
Sr. Information Architect
FCBi-NY Digital
v: 212.885.2802
f: 212.885.3516


----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Hanson" <Charles.Hanson at razorfish.com>

We had started with the idea of creating a dynamic relationship between the
two boxes, so that you would never get the error that would result from your
having selected an invalid range with the "to" date earlier than the "from".

But in order to truly make the NO INVALID RANGE rule work, the dynamic
relationship would have to be two way instead of one.  So the selection of a
date in the "To" field would elminate all dates later than it in the "From"
box.  I'm not sure whether that's a good idea.  It feels a little
unnecessarily restrictive, but perhaps it's just me.